


Leaving the Nest

by Morbane



Category: Map - Jason Webley (Song)
Genre: Constructive Criticism Welcome, Cosmogony, Gen, Nested Worlds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-08
Updated: 2013-09-08
Packaged: 2017-12-25 23:09:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/958710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She wasn't his lover; she was the map he used to find the world outside.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Leaving the Nest

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sleepfighter](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sleepfighter/gifts).



In a dark and starless place, children did not cry out for their parents, nor did parents cry out for their children - hands slipped listlessly from hands. Beings came into existence without any particular wonder, and watched their forebears die soon after, and did not mourn each other - it was a vegetable land, a land of fungus, without a sense of other in the sense of self.

One of these people who had grown below the earth stroked the roots of a tree that seemed to stroke his face in turn, as if they sought moisture there, though that was a useless search. The roots of the willow followed him through the dark, until he said: you should be like us. You should be a person.

He did not know what a shadow of a person he was.

He took the willow’s roots and wove a new being out of them. But although she was possessed of a different kind of life, she was as empty as the others. She needed something he did not have to give her. She would not wrap her arms around him; instead she raised them, and pointed up and away. So he took the ring he had made from the finger he had made. He threw it in the direction she was pointing, out into the night beyond that place; and then he followed its flight beyond the earth’s door.

Out in the light lands, the lands that lay between the earth and sky, the new traveller played and sang a summoning song, inviting to him anything boundless, or anything looking for a home.

He learned the lay of those lands — soft lands, sinking lands that were swirled about by the ocean. He taught the waves the sound of his name. He played late-night gigs and taught flute and keyboard lessons. He wrote on subway walls. He threaded string between skyscrapers. He filled out paperwork about his loneliness. He rented a little set of rooms up twenty-four flights of stairs, halfway to the stars, with a little aquarium. He cast paper planes into the storm winds, spells into the fire, and bottles into the sea.

He was gone a very long time. Behind him, where the lightless seasons breathed in and out, back and around, he knew the willows would sprout and wither, until the woman he had made was not a woman any more. And still he called and sang.

At last, one evening, someone came echoing his call. That evening was one in which the sea's soft breath rolled through the streets. The mist reached up to his twenty-four-floor-high windows. A song just like his floated in through a vent, vibrating with such urgency that it snapped the strings of his very own harp, on its way to his heart. He went slowly down his stairs and opened his door. He saw there a woman in a bridal gown, wearing his ring.

He saw that she was not a woman at all. The leaves in her hair were seaweed, not willow, and a trail of salt and foam stretched out behind her, marking where she’d come from. She was the whole of the sea.

“Not I,” he said: he refused her, because she held his ring, but she did not hold his promise. Instead, he led her twenty-four flights further down into the world, and opened a door, and let her flow through: to all of the children in the dark, who lived and died and did not know that they had anything else to ask for. To them he led the insatiable sea, the only thing in the world that asked for more than he.

Far below the world, the sea's ring slid back onto the cold, still fingers of the willow, and the willow, that had sought moisture, breathed in.  
When the whole world’s oceans had passed from that world to the next, the world that was left behind stood bright and empty, a mere set of nets and holes that the light and the dark might shred between them.

He climbed up his stairs again, twenty-four flights high. At the top of his stairs was a door: he stepped through it from the water-world into the air, and so the next twenty-four heights he flew.

The people below him called out to him, and he sang back to them to follow, and all of the musicians of the water world lifted up from its surface like a flock of shooting stars, going home to galaxies and nebulae: because that is the final door, the door that leads from Air into Fire.


End file.
